Power Star

 

For many, Super Mario 64 was the first glimpse or experience of gameplay in a 3D environment. The beguiling pre-rendered promo art sparked my interest before I ever picked up an N64 controller: the game went to the top of my holiday wishlist in 1996.

My personal memories of playing Mario 64 are somehow like those about a physical location — or perhaps more like an uncanny dream of a place that never existed — than like memories about a game. As a kid, I spent time running around Mario 64 just for the fun and mystery of the game’s expansive environments, which ranged from snow to desert to under the sea, just as often as I acquired stars within courses and hidden throughout Princess Peach’s Castle.

Super Mario 64 (partially found Spaceworld ’95 demo of Nintendo 64 3D platformer; 1995)

 

Mario 64‘s popularity has endured through the years. People have returned to the game again and again, or discovered it for the first time, including in a new form on Nintendo DS with additional playable characters and features in 2004 and as part of a limited 35th anniversary release for Nintendo Switch in 2020. Additionally, the community of Mario 64 speedrunners angling for new world records has resulted in the discovery of glitches and techniques that enable progressing through the game in creative ways.

The persistently fun, occasionally clunky, and strange charm of Mario 64, hazy memories of childhood mystery, and the drive of passionate players to modify and manipulate the game in seemingly unlimited ways have ensured that rumors, videos purporting to contain lost footage, and more have been circulated around online. The dark and weird side of all this has perhaps reached its ultimate form in the shape of the Mario 64 Iceberg.

The iceberg illustrates, tongue-in-cheek, the deepening levels of galaxy-brained obsession and questioning that spending a little too much time in the grasp of Mario 64 and its unanswered questions can lead to. Here, I will spend some time on 10 intriguing items about the game. This will include a few iceberg offerings as well as other tidbits that piqued my interest, and plenty of links to go around should you wish to dive deeper.

 

Wet-Dry World’s “Negative Emotional Aura”

“Considered one of the most bizarre levels in the game because of its strange atmosphere, Wet-Dry World is commonly associated with negative feelings and anomalous sightings.” – MIPS Hole SM64 Conspiracies

Wet-Dry World is a stage in the game that involves raising and lowering its water level strategically to access different areas divided into “Uptown” and “Downtown”, the latter of which is like an abandoned village in appearance. The lower or higher that you jump into the stage’s painting determines how high or low the water level will be when you arrive.

Skyboxes in video games form a background that helps to create the illusion of a more expansive world. The skyboxes of the courses in the Nintendo 64 original are a little uncanny to begin with, but there is something even more off about Wet-Dry World’s skybox.

This could be because Wet-Dry World’s skybox, shown at the bottom left in the collection of them above, contains an edited photograph of Casares, Spain that looks rather out of place in Mario 64. It is no surprise that this curious image ended up on the massively popular Twitter account Images with Elegiac Auras (“Images with haunting, unexplainable auras.”).

Wet-Dry World also includes doors that cannot be opened, which happen to share textures with those used in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. In the massive 2020 leak of Mario 64 beta content, it was confirmed that an early version of Wet-Dry World did indeed share assets from an early Ocarina of Time town.

Lastly, one my personal favorite pieces of recently released “beta” material has been this alternative soundtrack interpretation:

 

Luigi / “L is Real 2401”

One of the best-known Mario 64 rumors concerns the idea that Mario’s brother Luigi can be unlocked as a playable character. The star statue in the castle courtyard, with illegible writing beneath it, has helped fuel this rumor, as many have interpreted this text as a coded message: ‘L is Real 2401’. A supposed letter from Nintendo of America clarifies that it has “no meaning”. Nonetheless, over the years there have been countless elaborate rumors about “how to unlock Luigi” include specific instructions on what order to get the stars in, playing the game without saving, and jumping into the volcano in Lethal Lava Land.

One of many fake screenshots circulated over the years.

 

It was confirmed that Luigi was originally intended to be in the game:

Yoshiaki Koizumi (Assistant Director of Super Mario 64): When we made the first prototype, Mario and Luigi were on a flat field…We ran it that way, but when we made the landforms, because of hardware limitations we had a choice between cutting Luigi or making more elaborate landforms. Then, in tears, we had to ask Luigi to leave. (Iwata Asks)

A kind of satisfaction was achieved at last in the July 25th 2020 leak, which included parts and color palettes for a Luigi model with different proportions from Mario.

 

Super Mario 64 DS

(bLUWOOOL on Twitter)

 

Super Mario 64 DS is the Mario 64 experience with a few additional bells and whistles, such as being able to play as other characters. Not Waluigi, though.

The white room mentioned above refers to a DS-specific secret star you can only get as Luigi after becoming invisible, walking through a mirror, entering the reflection of the door you originally came through, and entering into a white void.

I would add more, but…there is something about Mario 64 DS that makes it actually almost too weird for me to play. Perhaps I will summon the courage to reach for it next time I am in the mood to re-enter the world of Mario 64.

 

Camera Strangeness

Super Mario 64 introduced the camera as a friend and foe in video games

 

Throughout your Mario 64 journey, you are being filmed by one of the Lakitu Bros. Recalling the framing device of Super Mario Bros. 3 as a stage play with curtains, Mario being filmed as part of a live television broadcast is part of the game’s story from the very beginning.

Many Nintendo 64 players will be familiar with the trials and tribulations of early 3D gaming and finicky camera controls. A wrong turn when trying to perform a difficult wall-jump, perhaps, could send you into the abyss as the perspective swerved to a wall rather than to Mario.

(Supper Mario Broth)

 

Unused / Beta Assets

Early, harrowing penguin renders used on a Kellogg’s cereal box

 

Though touched on in other areas so far, the number of unused assets and (actual) beta differences in general is worth a special mention. The Cutting Room Floor contains a great run-down of these assets, including entirely different enemies, textures, and sounds.

The artist mushbuh has created a delightful hi-res interpretation of the beta enemy Motos (uncovered in the 2020 beta leak):

 

Super Mario 64: Chaos Edition

Chaos Edition is a romhack that activates / deactivates codes that modify how the game functions. All kinds of surprising effects can occur, including being chased by game assets, Mario’s head spinning through his body, growing unexpectedly larger, and starting a course embodying a sign-post instead of Mario’s body.

 

Super Mario 64 Theme Park Lost to Time – Reino Aventura, Mexico

I was pleasantly surprised to see a video had been made dedicated to an explanation of this strange theme park I had, up to then, only seen in pixelated, hazy photos circulating on social media that I initially presumed to be fake.

 

Parallel Universes

“A Parallel Universe, or PU, is an area in a Super Mario 64 map at which the game creates phantom collision for objects “outside” of the level. This is because some of the values for collision detection are truncated into the range of the real map’s coordinate system, allowing some space that is intended to be Out of Bounds to become habitable.” – Unofficial Pannen Wiki

If you ever want to end up utterly enmeshed in the programming and mathematics of how Super Mario 64 works, and see some baffling tricks, you must visit pannenkoek2012’s channel. I can’t promise that you’ll immediately understand everything you hear, but it is fascinating.

 

Endless Stairs

If you haven’t acquired quite enough stars to reach the final boss behind the Big Star Door, you’ll end up getting stuck on an infinite staircase. The effect is caused by Mario warping backwards repeatedly.

“The music which plays while climbing the endless stairs is a Shepard tone, a sequence of notes which are made to sound as if they are infinitely ascending in tone when in fact they are looping.” – Mario Wiki

 

“Every Copy of Mario 64 is Personalized” / 1995/07/29 Beta Mario 64 Build

Every Copy of Mario 64 is Personalized is relatively new on the block when it comes to Mario rumors. Part meme, part creepypasta, and part nostalgic indulgence in the conventions of a bygone era, it has captured the attention and creativity of the fan community.

Inspiration for the concept originated in the appearance of a “Wario apparition” voiced by Mario’s voice actor, Charles Martinet, at video game trade event E3 in 1996. Snowballing from the apparition as “a ghost that manifests itself in select copies of Super Mario 64, and will eventually manifest itself in the real world,” to “the belief that every copy created of Super Mario 64 differed from each other at release date” based on an advanced AI that adapts to the player, the idea has spawned a collection of videos and images purporting to contain beta footage from commercials and gameplay.

A compliment to these theories, and returning to ideas touched on earlier regarding Wet-Dry World, are the experience and presentation of liminal spaces and the concept of backrooms. The articulation of these spaces, and what they mean, does well to capture what the landscape and gameplay of Mario 64 has symbolized to so many of us.

(Images with Elegiac Auras)

 

“I know for me, when I was younger I always had this nauseating urge to just explore the rest of the world of the video games I played. The rational part of me knew there was nothing, but still I was drawn to areas I couldn’t normally reach, and I would stare at static skyboxes forever, just wondering what was out there. I get a similar feeling as an adult when I view these liminal images. I’ve seen posts about the uncanny settings of the Mario 64 backgrounds, and I think it’s because everything is so unexplained. Where am I? What are these huge sprawling wastelands of nothing completely surrounding the level? What else is out there?” – u/Starman926 in r/LiminalSpace

(The Internal Plexus)

 

 

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p.s. Hey. If you’re me, and you’re not me obviously, but if you’re either like me in some fundamental way or not like me at all except for at least one shared hot spot, you’re excited by this dazzling weekend post guest-hosted by the wonderful artist, creative whirlwind, and long time friend of DC’s Marilyn Roxie, a post that not coincidentally marks the occasion of the recent upgrade/relaunch of ‘Mario 64’ on Switch. There are all kinds of cool twists and turns and behind the scenes peeks up there, and please enjoy foraging. And, as ever, any words you can spare for your host Marilyn Roxie would be both proper and very welcome. Thanks so much, Marilyn! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yep. How did the outdoors treat you? And ace about the Flash Fiction course! And whoo-hoo and beyond about the new Play Therapy add! Everyone, If you’re not already an anticipation-filled addict of Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic’ Robinson’s astute and partying podcast/show Play Therapy and its action affirming mix of ‘Acid House, Electro, New Wave, Coldwave and a deluge of other oddities’, you can join the gang because the new episode is very live. ** Dominik, Hi, D!! Yeah, my laptop may not be perfect, but it’s being fully cooperative again so far. I’m pretty good. Nothing hugely new apart from the return of my online life. Great, great that the videochat went so well! Oh, wow, weeks, that is a lengthy set up time, but still! You’re happy! Congrats, pal. Oh, did you do anything for Halloween? Did you end up hitting that slightly scary seeming haunted house if it even ended up happening? It’s not official, but Biden has basically won the election. It’s just about how long that truth will take to become factual because Trump, massively predictably, is reacting like an insane, sadistic baby. How strange! Or not? I just read a big piece about Hudinilson Jr. yesterday and made a note to investigate and try to make a blog post about him. So that’s cool. Love like the boy who homemade my all-time favorite music video. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you! Love that Nilsson (song). And, as always, you gotta hand it to the French. ** dadoodoflow, Hey! Super awesome to see you! And to know I succeeded! It’s like Xmas! xo ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yes, and, even though the fix-it shop didn’t quite fix everything this poorly laptop needs, it’s working like a relative charm. And yes, I had to search through hoops to find that Brazzers video, for better or worse. ** Armando, Hi. Yeah, well, it’s a not that harsh a quarantine at the moment, but the strong rumor is it’s going to get quite harsh very soon. Hm, I like everything about Robbe-Grillet’s oeuvre. I don’t think I can isolate one particular quality about it that I like best. ‘The Unnamable’ is great, I agree. One of my favorite favorite Beckett’s, for sure. Thanks about the post. And thank you very much about ‘PGL’, of course. For me, writers block is only ever about being overcome with insecurity. Or it was until I figured that out and just let myself write whatever the fuck I could, not worrying if it was good or bad, knowing that I can edit/fix it later when I’m feeling less insecure. So, yeah, I say just write and don’t care if it seems good enough to you at the moment because, if you’re blocked, you’re not a good judge. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi, Brian. It was a little tricky in the sense that I had to travel an illegal, i.e. beyond 1 km distance from my abode to find an open shop. Super glad you liked a lot of the post’s wares. Cool. Yeah, it’s in the bag. Biden’s win, I mean. But, exactly, how much shit will Trump’s narcissism freakout will cause until it’s a fait accompli is the big stress point now. Could he even be a more vile, horrible piece of garbage? Answer: no. Me too: I’ve been living and breathing the election results every waking minute since Wednesday. But starting today I’m going to retry the rest of the world. Derf Backderf: what a name. I was pretty young when Kent State happened, but I remember the news and effect, for sure. Interesting: the book. It’s really good? Really, it pretty much was just the US election and missing my laptop and catching up on emails for those few days. But this weekend holds some kind of promise anyway, I’m not sure what since everything is closed, but … You have cool plans, or, did you and did they come fully about? Have a great couple of ones. ** Bill, Hey. Ha ha, yeah, the Shauna Born … as excessive as it was, I felt like I had to post every single one of her drawings to make her point. I read something about ‘The Eyes of My Mother’, but I can’t remember what. I’ll see if it’s lodged on one of my ‘illegal’ sites. Thanks, bud. ** Right. Enjoy your weekend with Mario and Marilyn! See you on Monday.

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Jenny Holzer Someone Wants To Cut A Hole In You And Fuck You Through It, Buddy, 2012

 

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Sarah Bahbah Untitled, 2019
‘Sarah Bahbah, the Palestinian, Australian-raised artist crystallises the universal but rarely captured experience of oversaturated, intense feelings and imperfect relationships. Her protagonists give voice to the vast spectrum of emotion, spanning the desire for inner peace, true love, fear of commitment, playful ambivalence towards life and the paradox of wanting intimacy but craving isolation.’

 

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Dash Snow Fuck the Police, 2005
‘Dash Snow’s Fuck the Police presents a prized collection of newspaper headlines emblazoned with instances cop corruption. Each salacious story is splattered with cum and framed and mounted as a trophy.’

 

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Alfred Steiner Various, 2012 – 2018
‘I spent my elementary school years in rural Ohio—in a big pile of animal parts. My best friend’s dad had a VCR and three VHS tapes, Star Wars, Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The latter was my favorite, and not just because its fictional events took place on the day I was born. There’s a scene in it where one of the nubile victims stumbles into a room strewn with bones—mostly animal—at once terrifying and rustic in the yellow Texas sun. Not to be outdone, my friend and I discovered a boneyard ourselves while roaming a nearby farm, and harvested a few cow skulls that we cleaned with bleach. There was also a fur dealer who lived nearby in a dank hovel just past the creek. In our only encounter, I watched this man enthusiastically carve out the heart of a fox and hand it to me. A second canine figures into this period, this time a Jack Russell terrier that leapt into the air to catch the freshly severed testicles of a goat that my mom was kid-proofing for a petting zoo. But none of those experiences prepared me for the day I stepped off my bus and opened the mailbox to find a severed blue eye staring back at me. Lowering the door of the box, I peered in to find the milky, apple-sized orb suspended in a jar of formaldehyde. It was an unsolicited gift from our veterinarian, who was ostensibly indulging my predilection for the anatomical. Pressing my memory for other seminal experiences involving entrails, I come up empty. But I do remember my friend telling me that his dad had a fourth videotape: Adult Cartoons.’ — AS

 

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Elizabeth Jaeger Maybe We Die So The Love Doesn’t Have To, 2015
Hydrocal, latex paint and hair

 

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Tony Matelli Fuck’d, 2004

 

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Kathe Burkhart Various, 1983 – 2007
‘Elizabeth Taylor’s multiple personae–actress, vixen, Hollywood royalty, serial wife and divorcée, party girl, charitable humanitarian, entrepreneur, rebel, dominant woman–acts as a media-based mirror of contemporary female identity. For Kathe Burkhart, Taylor becomes a doppelganger in her paintings, in which tabloid, paparazzi shots and publicity stills from Taylor’s films are emblazoned with profanities that reclaim female sexuality and power. “I locate my position as oppositional on several levels: as a critique of representation, particularly that of women and also as a rupturing of idiomatic packaging/presentation devices,” notes the artist.’

 

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Miss Fuck Oups raté, 2020

 

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Mladen Stilinović Fuck the Wall, 1975

 

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Betty Tompkins Fuck Paintings, 2002 – 2006
‘Tompkins’ paintings are often described as “photorealist”. Yet she says: “My work compared to an actual photorealist is lame. They’re interested in getting everything. I’m interested in getting just enough.” She made the first of her Fuck Paintings straight out of grad school in 1969, a time when almost every female artist was ignored, whatever she was making. As for a young woman making enormous paintings of penises: “Nobody wanted to have anything to do with them or me.”’

 

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Awol Erizku Oh what a feeling, aw, fuck it, I want a Trillion, 2014

 

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Brazzers Hot sex with the girls at the exhibition of contemporary art, 2015
‘Modern Museum of Fine Ass Only the finest booties have a shot at getting into the Modern Museum of Fine Ass, the world’s biggest collection of perfect juicy butts. When Danny heard they had a gallery where any bum-loving ticket holder could poke, spank, and tickle huge, roundest white asses around. Danny got to his knees spanking, sniffing, and fondling every butt in front of him. When Julie Cash couldn’t wait another second to get some cock, she turned her face around and offered her mouth for a deep throat blowjob. Knowing there was a big hammer like Danny’s in the room, Richelle Ryan got jealous, and invited him to pound her body-painted posterior.’

 

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Andrei Molodkin YES WE CAN FUCK YOU, 2011
black and green ballpoint pens on canvas, acrylic block and plastic hoses filled with crude oil, pump, compressor

 

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Shauna Born All The Boys I’d Like To Fuck, 2012
‘Freezing in time the fleeting beauty of life, and in particular the brevity and transience of youth, has long been a concern of visual art. It’s a natural fit, understandable, bordering on the obvious, that a medium like painting be used in such a way. The ability of painting and drawing to freeze a moment in time gives it the enviable power of making immortal (and timeless) the imagery it conveys. That which is portrayed in a picture stays immutable and constant while the rest of us poor souls submit to the humbling humilities brought about by the merciless elements of time, aging and gravity. The work of Shauna Born, who up to now has focused principally on youthful portraiture, is no exception to this described desire to make the world stop spinning. Her painted portraits of pretty young things ooze with a lightness of being. Ethereal and decadent, they often appear to be contemplating nothing more than their own fleeting existence, which in turn reminds the viewer of theirs. A momento mori minus the skulls-and-spook-show imagery.’

 

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Aldo Chaparro Too Drunk to Fuck, 2009

 

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Mom and Jerry Be free fuck it all!, 2011
‘Throughout an illustrious career, starting as street artists and working their way up to the top of the international contemporary art scene, Mom & Jerry are today considered cultural and civic icons. The multi-faceted Mom, and her dirty son Jerry have a passion for art, music, parties, glitter and fashion. In addition to being artists, they consider themselves rebels, outlaws, DJs, living sculptures, talk show hosts, TV personalities, movie stars, and most recently, progressive Broadway dancers.’

 

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Özgür Kar It is all in his head, 2020
Two 4K videos with sound, 20 mins loop. Two 75” TVs, TV stands, Media players, Cord-reel.

 

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Hudinilson Jr. Cadernos de Referênci, 1979 – 2010
‘The artist Hudinilson Jr. truly transformed himself and his life into an ongoing record of his relationship with images. When he died in 2013, he left an apartment that could be mistaken for an archive, overrun as it was with artworks, magazine and newspaper clippings, notes and notebooks. He’d spent decades hoarding and editing thousands of fragments, many of which ended up glued to the more than one hundred and thirty Cadernos de Referência (Reference Notebooks), his name for the notebooks and address books of various shapes and sizes in which he worked daily. His process was singular—and nonlinear. Images clipped in the 1970s might be fished out and juxtaposed or overlapped with others selected in 2010; a page that had seemingly been finished for years could be reopened and filled some more at any given time. The limit was the utter saturation of every single page.

‘In the collages, sexually explicit images frequently coexist with news about the art world; posed portraits of local TV stars rub elbows with reproductions of religious artworks or shocking scenes of accidents and deaths. Each assemblage was guided by the power of attraction and contrast between the manipulated images. Leafing through these notebooks it is clear that, to this artist, images had a haptic nature that surpassed their referential significance or visual appearance. Images can be caressed, shaped, compressed or loosened; they have weight, taste, and consistency. One can play a synesthetic game with them, or a sensual one. This principle is inherent to Hudinilson Jr.’s practice, and that is why he was able to glimpse the act of anal penetration in a sequence of photocopies of a banana being peeled.’

 

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Harland Miller I’m So Fucking Hard–Ernest Hemingway, 2002

 

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Tracey Emin & Louise Bourgeois And so I kissed you, 2009 – 2010
‘The ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ series originated with Bourgeois, who began the works by painting male and female torsos in profile on paper, mixing red, blue and black gouache pigments with water to create delicate and fluid silhouettes. Bourgeois then passed the images on to Emin. This suite of prints was one of the last projects Louise Bourgeois completed before her death.’

 

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Liu Ding A man fucking a chicken, 2007
Marble, taxidermy

 

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Anna Uddenberg Transit Mode – Abenteuer, 2014 – 2016
fiberglass, aqua resin, synthetic hair, fabric spray filler, denim, glass, steel

 

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Nikola Tamindzic Stoya fucking New York, 2016
‘Fucking New York. Is it a statement about the awesomeness of the city? Is it a whine about the city’s unapologetic cruelty? Is it literally fucking the NYC? How do you interpret this title?’

 

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Mieko Meguro Dan, Fuck kale, 2019
‘Mieko Meguro displays a variety of portraits of the public figure with whom she shares her life, the artist Dan Graham. The contrasts and contradictions of life together appear quickly from the harmless lightness of the images — an accumulation of everyday scenes shakes this narrative, then moves it to cushions, embroidered with the image of Dan Graham wearing a “Fuck Kale” T-shirt.’

 

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Bruce Nauman Seven Figures, 1985
‘For the neons, Bruce Nauman made sketches in pencil, charcoal and watercolour. For the figures, he used the outlines of the bodies of himself and his wife. The double outlines in different colours indicate where neon is to be used, and the layered figures indicate how they will appear when the neon flashes on and off. The primary colours red, yellow and blue are used for the male figures, while the female figures are represented in softer shades like pink, green and orange. The timing of the sequences is very important and is fixed and repeated in a continual loop, each figure having its own individual programme.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. So my laptop died on Thursday morning, as I was doing the p.s. in fact, and it has been in the repair shop until just now, and I haven’t been able to access my blog the whole time, which is why this place was on hold. Anyway, we’re back, but it’s very late in the day, so I’m going to speed quickly through the p.s. today, sorry, but I’ll be usual verbose self tomorrow. ** Dominick, Hi, D! For the aforementioned reason I just have to say a warm hello today, and send you love like a successful computer repair person. More talkative tomorrow. ** David Ehrenstein, Actually they were two hers and two thems among the authors. Fingers crossed for us (all) on this scary but increasingly hopeful seeming day. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. My wish is still on hold, eek. ** Steve Erickson, Good luck getting through the day, and here’s still fervently hoping. ** Armando, Hi. I’m better now that I have a laptop and Biden ‘seems’ to be the winner. No, no package, but that’s possibly because our concierge is barely here right now because of the quarantine, so I just have to wait until I see him. Maybe even today. ** Okay. Today’s post is my attempt by default to please you all and distract you in the US from the hopeful but as yet uncertain state of today. Very sorry again for rushing. See you in normal mode tomorrow.